Here I will post some short pieces on Sarala Mahabharata. Sarala Das is known as the "aadikavi" (the first poet) of Oriya Literature. He lived and wrote in the 15th Century. Mahabharat is his magnum opus. The episodes in Sarala's Mahabharat are significantly different from those in Vyasa's (Sanskrit) Mahabharat.

Saturday, April 1, 2017

KANSA MAMU, NO SAKUNI MAMU

The The maternal uncle or manu in Odia culture is someone who is very affectionate and caring
towards his nephew (or niece) and mamu
ghara (maternal uncle’s house) is a place where the nephew spends a happy
time, where he eats dudha bhata (rice
with milk), which stands for delicious food in the language. But whatever be
the cultural norms, reality sometimes presents for us surprises of all kinds.
Thus there are maternal uncles who are deviant from the norm in varying degrees.
The mamu who is dangerously or even aggressively
unfond of his nephew is called “kansa mamu”;
everyone knows that the phrase embodies the relationship between Krishna and
his maternal uncle, Kansa and everyone knows what all the uncle did to get rid of
his nephew. The phrase is used to condemn a nasty maternal uncle. In Odia, “pulis (police man)” is called “mamu” and “jail” is called “mamu ghara” (uncle’s house) because of
the association of both these expressions with punishment. There are two hills called
mamu – bhanaja parbata (maternal
uncle- nephew) in Balugaon in Khurda district and there is a saying about them: bhanaja parbata badhe, mamu parbata chide
(the nephew mountain grows and the uncle mountain shrinks.

There are other popular expressions about
the maternal uncle and his nephew, which conform to the cultural stereotype, where
the mamu is benevolent and
protective. These are “jahna mamu”
(The Moon uncle - Mother Earth’s brother) and “bagha mamu” (The Tiger uncle), in which the protector of the forest
becomes the protector of children as well. However, bagha mamu is also used to frighten children: dudha pi de nahele bagha mamu asiba (drink the milk, otherwise
Tiger uncle will come.). “Kana mamu
(uncle who is blind in one eye)”, created by the novelist Lakshmikanta Mohapatra,
is a very lovable character in Odia literature. An accomplished wrestler, he was
the common mamu of all those young
persons in the village who came to train under him. He loved them and was loved
by them.

Now,
what is interesting is that there is no phrase “sakuni mamu” (Sakuni uncle); if the language

has
“kansamamu”, how come it does not have “sakuni mamu”?

The word “sakuni”
is used in the language as a metaphor for a person who is treacherous

and uses low cunning to achieve his purpose. As
Supriya Prashant tells me, a brother who meddles with matters his sister’s
family, taking advantage of their vulnerability or trust, and exploits them, is
referred to as a sakuni. One of the
characters in Surendra Mohanty’s classic, Neela
Saila, refers to the treacherous commander-in-chief of King Ramachandra
Deva as ‘nirghata sakuni (an out and
out Sakuni)”. But there is no expression in the language that condemns Sakuni
as maternal uncle.

So, then, is Sakuni not popularly viewed as a harmful
and dangerous uncle? It doesn’t seem he is. On the contrary, he is thought of
as an aggressively caring uncle who was more worried than anyone else about the
welfare of his nephew, Duryodhana and by implication, all the Kaurava princes. Dhritarashtra,
the father of the Kaurava princes, was blind and for all practical purposes
their mother, Gandhari, was blind too. The Kuru elders did not distinguish
between the children of Dhritarashtra, the king and those of his deceased
younger brother, the virtuous Pandu, who was the king before him. He gave up
kingship after he was unfortunately cursed. Now the Kuru elders were favourably
inclined towards Pandu’s children and wanted the Yudhisthira to inherit the
throne of Hastinapura. Sakuni would not let this happen; he openly worked for
his sister, Gandhari’s eldest born, Duryodhana, to become the future king. It
was another matter that he failed in this mission and was instrumental in
leading his nephews to a war with their cousins, which turned out to be a disaster
for the former. But at the same time one can hardly say that he was a bad mamu, who was hostile towards his
nephews.

Some think that Sakuni was actually a kansa mamu in the guise of a jahna mamu and that he was indeed much
worse. He had left his kingdom and had stayed with his sister, not to look
after his sister’s children, but to take revenge against the Kurus. When the
incomparable Bhishma went to the king of Gandhar to seek his daughter
Gandhari’s hand for Dhritarashta the king and his family were not pleased. Gandhari
was beautiful and well-groomed and Dhritarashtra was blind from birth. But no one had the courage to reject the
proposal for fear of Bhishma, who, everybody knew, had no equal in the
battlefield.

After her marriage, Gandhari chose to cover her
eyes and live the rest of her life that way. Whatever she might have said by
way of justifying her action, some think that it was her - a helpless woman’s -
way of protesting against her destiny. But her brother Sakuni chose to take
revenge. He told absolutely no one about it. Not even his sister. He died with
it. He was determined to make the Kuru family pay for insulting the king of Gandhar.
War with Hastinapura, protected by Bhishma, was not an option; foul means was
the only option for him. Chasing his dark dream, he left his kingdom and spent
a difficult life in his sister’s house in order to execute his revenge,
unsuspected by anyone. His revenge was against Bhishma and the family he
represented and if making them pay meant destroying his sister’s children, he
let that be. In this reading of the Mahabharata,
he still remains the mamu extremely
fond of his bhanajas. No one had any
suspicion that he didn’t have the welfare of his nephews in mind.

Sarala’s version is no different as far as - only as far as - Sakuni’s uncle-hood is concerned. Duryodhana had implicit trust in him. He had
greater trust in him than in his mother who had warned him against her own
brother. She had told him clearly and emphatically that Sakuni was no
well-wisher of his and that he would ensure the destruction of the Kauravas and
take revenge for what he had done to his family.

And what Duryodhana had done to his maternal
grandfather’s family, in Sarala's version, was foul beyond description. Before Gandhari was married
to Dhritarashtra, she had been married to a sahada
tree, which died immediately and with that ended the hindrance to her wedding,
in a manner of speaking. Both she and Dhritarashtra were born under inauspicious
stars. Once a princess was chosen for Dhritarastra, she would die. Once a prince
was chosen for Gandhari, he would die. Dhritarastra was destined to marry a
widow, which he did, when Gandhari’s first husband, the sahada tree, died.

When Duryodhana knew this, he was livid and
wanted to punish the king of Gandhar and his family and relatives for marrying a
widow to his father. He imprisoned his unsuspecting relations and starved them
to death. Only Sakuni had survived. His father had instructed him to avenge
their death, if he lived and had thereby defined the purpose of his living.
Thus Sakuni was condemned to a second imprisonment, from which he freed himself
on the battlefield of Kurukshetra on the penultimate day of the War. This story of Sakuni's death occurs in this blog.

Returning to his first imprisonment, everyone
had died and only Sakuni had lived. One day things so happened that Duryodhana came
to look upon him as bhuta bhavishya jnata
(the knower of the past and the future), set him free, made him his minister and
wouldn’t hear anything against him from anyone whatsoever. That made things
easier for Sakuni. One kindness he had shown his father’s enemy: he had kept
his mission a secret from him. Duryodhana died, after he had died, without
knowing the truth about the uncle who he had trusted completely. For the bhanaja, he was the perfect mamu.

Post-script: Our patriarchal cultures are
loaded against the mother’s family, observes Sewa Bhattaray, responding to this
piece. In real life, father’s brothers can be as bad or even worse - one
certainly cannot disagree. But consider there is no phrase in Odia comparable to Kansa
Mamu that condemns the wicked and evil brother of the father, who ill-treats
his nephew; perhaps the patriarchal culture takes care of this linguistic gap,
going by Bhattarai. It's different in the puranic stories though.

In Sarala
Mahabharata, as in some other versions of the ancient story, Vidura had pleaded with
Dhritarashtra to allow him to kill his first-born, Duryodhana, after the wise
man had foretold that he would be the cause of the destruction of the kula
(here, “family”). Let that one child die, in order that his ninety-nine
siblings live and the family does not suffer annihilation, uncle Vidura had pleaded. As
the Great War on the Kurukshetra battlefield was nearing its end, Vidura
reminded the helpless, grieving father about his suggestion. He told him that
he would not have suffered that pain in his old age had he sacrificed just one
child of his.

I have often thought about it. To me, it does
not matter that the father did not allow his brother to do this; what does is
that with that thought and with those words the virtuous uncle had killed his infant
nephew that day. Now, was this a killing any less agonizing than the killing that Duryodhana suffered later on the battlefield?